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8Mar

How to Use Youtube to Market Your Business

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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video_marketing

With over 30 million unique visitors per day and thousands of hours of videos uploaded every day, Youtube is the world’s largest video search engine. In fact, Youtube is currently the world’s second largest search engine for online content in general. What does this mean for your business?

It means that if you can find a way to harness Youtube, you can drive a ton of traffic to your business, increase your industry relevance, and become a go-to resource and well-known authority in your niche.

However, like any platform, it takes time, effort, commitment, and more importantly, knowledge of the right strategies to enjoy significant success on the platform. We’ll discuss a few tips here to get you started.

Find Popular Videos and Mirror Their Content

They say that imitation is the finest form of flattery. Well, you’ll have to do the same here. We’re not saying that you should go and duplicate existing content — that would be unethical. But we are saying that you need to learn everything you can about the competition. If someone has tried to do the same kind of thing you’re considering in your own marketing, find out who’s done it before and how. If they did something that worked, find out how. If they did something that didn’t, find out why. And whatever they did, do a better job, whether it’s through the tactics of the medium or the quality of the content.

To do that, therefore, do a search for the most popular channels in your industry and Youtube in general. See what they are doing, and take copious notes of their methods. Some of those videos may not have any direct correlation to your industry, but you could learn a thing or two from the concepts. For instance, if you own a plumbing business, instead of just creating how-tos, you could create a series of videos about funny or worst job experiences. This will grow your brand and popularity on the platform.

Optimize Your Videos and Channels

Create a fully optimized and branded Youtube account. To do this, use target keywords in the name of your channel, and always optimize all your videos with the appropriate keywords so that they benefit from high visibility in Youtube and Google searches.

Create short videos, just a few minute long at the most. Most people are now averse to watching videos that are 20+mins in length. Instead of just creating one long video, create four 5min videos, upload them to Youtube, and create a playlist so that people can watch them one after the other if they want that 20 minute Youtube experience.

Produce Top-Notch Content

Nothing works better on Youtube than creating excellent content. You may not need to hire a professional film crew to accomplish this. Just get comfortable with the camera and remember that all the entertainment and education your video may offer is meant to be part of a dialogue with your audience, and simply have that conversation with the camera.

For those who are too camera-shy, and for those niches that support it, you can use screen-recording software and record a voice-over for it. This can illustrate what a person could do, say, with a software product you may be trying to showcase.

In case you want to interact more with your audience, you can create interactive Q&A sessions using Google Hangouts or Live Events, which you can make available to people and list as part of your content.

Find Leading Influencers in Your Niche and Engage Them

There are often leading influencers on Youtube that you can get to promote your business if you’re so inclined. If you don’t want to go the long route of building an authority niche and are willing to spend some money, you could locate some of these influencers and get them to promote your business on their channels and videos. Whether you do this manually or through a simplified service like NeoReach’s social media influencer marketing platform, you can find established personalities on Youtube that can support your brand and marketing efforts by lending your business their reach.

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5Jan

Internet Business Tips: Best Practice Email Marketing Rules

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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For email marketing to be effective, it is important that you know what you are doing. Following these best practice email marketing strategies will ensure that you get the attention of your customers the right way.

Be Personal

You are 22% more likely to get a potential customer to open an email if their name is included. The best way to collect this information is by pulling information from online transactions and asking customers at the store if they would like to be added to your email list. The direct address is much more likely to catch your customers eye.

Another way to be personal with your customers is to offer information about things that they may like. If you sell clothes, for example, and you are having a sale on an item similar to something they have bought, let them know.

Follow a Good Format

If you can get your customers attention enough for them to open the email, then it is important that you deliver important information in a format. Your subject line should contain information without being too specific. For example, if you are trying to get customers to come to a charity benefit, begin with Join us this Saturday in CityName. In the first line, add information such as who will attend the event, what it is for, and what time it will begin. Adding this information first will ensure that the customer finds out what they need to know before they send the email to the trash folder.

Timing Is Everything

The day and time that you send an email are huge influencing factors in whether or not a customer reads it. Statistics shows that customers are more likely to open an email that arrives between 6 and 10 than any other time during the work day. Additionally, it is believed that it is not a good idea to send out emails on Monday when customers are de-stressing, or on weekends, when they want to relax. Follow these guidelines and test out the time and day that works best for you.

Be Clear

Checking emails is a task that is often rushed through. For this reason, it is important that you are clear with customers. Let them know what your email is about. If there is a sale, tell them right away. If you have a new launch of a line they may be interested in, state this clearly in the first line. Then, provide some general information without making the email too long. Information in an email must be easy to digest to be effective.

Ask the Right Questions

A great way to engage with customers is to ask questions. Creating a follow-through link to provide feedback or take an on-site survey is a great way to do this. Another benefit of this is that it allows you to get feedback. Dissatisfied customers are a lot more likely to leave a review than a happy one, unless you ask them for their opinion. Make it easy for them to leave reviews and if you are asking for specific feedback, keep it around 3 to 5 questions.

Do Not Forget Mobile Customers

Many emails, especially those checked in the middle of the day, are checked from cell phones. This makes it important that your emails are easy to read for mobile users. You should also be sure that any of your click-through links go to pages that are compatible with mobile phones. Otherwise, it is a lot less likely that you are going to communicate with your customer.

To learn more or start a conversation about the ins and outs of email marketing, check out Kreativa.co, an online marketing community.

About the author:

Lautaro Martinez a marketing agent and freelance writer is always looking for new and innovative ways to market. If you would like to learn more about Lautaro, you can check out his google+ profile.

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15Dec

5 Social Media Questions You Need to Be Asking

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Advice Social Media
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social media question

 

 

 

The goal of social media is to elevate your brand and your business. The best way to this is by having a consistent brand image and connecting with your audience, but are you following all the rules of engagement on social media? Here are 5 social media questions you should be asking.

 

1. Are my social media posts as successful as they could be? 

Being self aware of how your social media platform is performing is the most important thing you can do for yourself and your brand. You must be able to recognize how successful your posts are and how you can improve them to make them even more successful. Thankfully, there are specialized analytics platforms at your disposal to use to determine how your social media accounts are stacking up. Use these to your advantage to stay ahead of the game!

 

2. Does my content add value to my audience?

 

The main reason you created your business and brand in the first place was to bring something new and fresh to an existing market. Your audience relies on you for quality content that means something to them so you absolutely have to make sure that your content is always adding value to your audience. You don’t want to become the boring brand or the annoying brand.


3. What opportunities am I missing out on with social media?

 

There are so many different opportunities for you to capitalize on when it comes to your social media platforms so its important to keep track of the ones your successfully using and the ones you may be missing out on. Keep informed and up to date with the popular trends on social media to make sure you’re using the right hashtags, Twitter chats, or advertising to methods to remain connected with your audience. If you’re interacting and posting in the wrong places, no one will be able to find you and promote your brand.

 

4. What social media network is the top referring channel to your website?

 

 

Knowing how your audience is getting to your website is very important so that you know where to devote the majority of your time. By using Google Analytics you can determine which social media network provides the majority of traffic to your website; by doing this you can figure out which network to be more focused on. If you aren’t getting any traffic from your Facebook page, you obviously don’t need to devote a lot of time towards that channel. If the majority of your traffic comes from Twitter, it would be wise to spend more time with your Twitter profile and interacting with your audience there.

 

 

5. Are there brands you can cross promote with on social media? 

 

The odds are that there are plenty of other brands or businesses out there in the same boat as you, so why not team up with them and benefit both of you at the same time? Joining forces with another brand helps you reach a different audience than you usually do and shows that you are willing to do what it takes to be successful. Additionally, this can also be a great learning experience and you may pick up on some helpful tools or tricks from someone else that will make you more successful in the long run. Finally, by forming social media partnerships you will have other brands you can rely on for assistance and promotion for many years to come.

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18Nov

10 Marketing Lessons I’ve Learned From Tim Ferriss

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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tim ferriss

Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Workweek, entrepreneur, startup investor and lifestyle designer, started on the groundfloor and worked his way into a best selling author through his not just his intellect, but through his marketing techniques. Here are ten marketing lessons I’ve learned from Tim Ferriss.

1. Personally connect with people.

Connections are such a key part of any type of business, without them you will not succeed. Having the ability to make a personal connection with your customers is a great tool to have and you will find great success with it. If your customers feel like you have connected with them personally, they’ll feel special and people who feel special want more of that feeling. If they know that coming to you makes them feel important they’re going to keep coming back for more. You can also use this to your advantage as well, if you are personally connected with your customers you can understand what they want and be able to better shape your content towards what they’re looking for.

 

2. Interview other people who can provide value to your audience.

No one can expect you to do absolutely everything by yourself, and if you’re the only person appealing to your audience, after a while they’ll get tired of it as well. Keep your content fresh and do yourself a favor by having other people join you from time to time. This can include anything such as interviewing other people, especially people who can provide value and something different to your audience. Tim Ferriss keeps his content fresh by interviewing different people on both his television show and his podcast, adding new and interesting content with every new episode to keep his audience entertained.

 

3. Always have a call to action.

When promoting your business and product, a key way to make sure you are always providing enough information to your audience is to assume that they don’t know much. Make sure you add enough quality information to clearly get your message across. Your audience won’t know what you want them to do unless you specifically tell them, by providing a call to action. Your call to action message should be a clear and direct statement telling your audience what you want them to do with your message in order to reach some goal. Call to actions can even be as subtle as renaming a page on your blog showcasing your podcast from “Podcast” to “Listen to My Podcast!” – as long as it is clear and direct.

 

4. Showcase how other industries could offer insights.

Bringing in people from other industries to add content to your blog can be a great way to keep your content engaging, but at first it may seem like their specific industry has nothing to do with your own. Tim Ferriss has overcome this by always being able to connect one industry back to his own. This way you can have a variety of people adding content while still being relevant to your audience. For example, Tim Ferriss recently interviewed “The Iceman”, a daredevil who is infamous for being capable of enduring extreme cold temperatures. At first glance, this may not seem like it’s relevant to Ferriss’ audience, but he connected it back by noting that although you may not be attempting any of the Iceman’s adventures on your own, you can learn something from his endurance and internal strength to add to your own life. It’s important to always make the connection between other industries and your own so your audience can take away more from your content then they were originally expecting to.

5. Create a clear focus for what your brand stands for and create strategies to implement this.

Having a strong message that embodies your brand is a huge part of the brand building process and shouldn’t be ignored; it’s also important to keep your message consistent. Focus on what your brand stands for and utilize your marketing strategies to remind your customers what your message is. For example, Tim Ferriss is known as a lifestyle expert and entrepreneur who left a corporate career for one of traveling while running a business. How does he continue to showcase this element of his brand? For his birthday every year he offers different gifts to his fans to get them involved. One year it was a free round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world and another it was 100,000 cash, plus a round-trip ticket. Marketing strategies like this further enforces his brand message and reminds all of his customers what his brand is all about.  

 

6. Offer your product for free in exchange for honest reviews to jumpstart the buzz.

One of the best ways to ensure that people will buy your product is if it has good reviews. Consumers are beginning to trust the reviews left by other consumers even more than word of mouth these days so having good reviews on your product is an absolute must. A good strategy in order to gain reviews is to offer your product for free to a certain group of people in exchange for honest reviews (make sure you’re not asking them for positive reviews, if your product is of good quality they will say so). Most people will jump on this offer and will be more than happy to take a few minutes out of their day to leave a review on your product. This will jumpstart the buzz on your product and gives other consumers reviews to help them make a decision.

 

7. Create your own lifestyle that works for you instead of accepting the status quo.

The entire story of Tim Ferriss’ success begins with the change that he decided to make in his own life in regards to his career. Having come up with the idea of the Four Hour Work Week as a solution to his workaholic lifestyle, Tim Ferriss completely changed his lifestyle to fit his needs and desires. At the end of the day, the most important thing in life is you. You have to do what’s right for you personally and everything else will fall into place. Take your career in your own hands like Ferriss and create your own kind of lifestyle that works for you. Just because the world dictates that a 9 to 5 job is the status quo doesn’t mean you have to abide by it. Whether it’s giving your career a complete overhaul or even just convincing your boss to let you work from home on Fridays, take charge of your career and your life and make it work to your standards.  

 

8. Experiment with your marketing tactics.

Marketing can be hit and miss, sometimes your strategies will be a home run, and sometimes they’ll strike out. A good rule of thumb is to keep your marketing tactics new, don’t use the same old method over and over again. Don’t be afraid to try a new email campaign, a different blogging approach, or even bring in someone who can evaluate your current marketing efforts and let you know where you might be missing a beat. Sometimes a revitalization of your marketing tactics will be just the key you need to get things going, so don’t be afraid to experiment and see what works.  

 

9. Perfect the soft-sell method.

One of the most key things to remember when promoting your product is it’s completely unnecessary to oversell your product to your audience. Perfecting the art of the soft sell will work wonders for your business. There is no need to annoy your audience to buy your product; instead, keep them interest in what you have already been doing and they’ll continue to come back for more. Tim Ferriss calls this the “soft-sell method” and uses it whenever he is promoting a new book or product he’s selling. For instance, when Ferriss had a new book coming out he announced it three months in advance and then kept his content from there on focused on what the book would offer, rather than continuously reminding his audience to buy his book. In the post where he announces the book even, the content is subtle. He’s not in your face asking you to buy, buy, buy – instead, he’s simply showing you what you’ll get out of the book if you choose to purchase it.

 

10. Offer exciting incentives that people will desire.

Most businesses have jumped on board the incentive bandwagon; everyone knows that offering incentives is a sure-fire way to bring customers in and keep them there. If a customer were getting something extra in return for their business, why wouldn’t they want to keep coming back? To stay ahead, you have to be offering something more exciting than your competitors, something your audience will absolutely desire and have to have. Tim Ferriss accomplished this by offering over $4,000,000 in prizes in exchange for the purchase of his new book through different packages. As Tim Ferriss has shown, if you want people to buy your product, offer them something exciting and spectacular in return; make the decision of whether or not to buy your product a no-brainer.

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29Sep

Social Media Video Tip: Comment on Blogs

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Blogging Social Media
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http://katieleimkuehler.com/social-media-video-tip-dont-post-too-much-or-too-often/

Start Interacting Online with Blog Comments

Are you looking to expand your social media presence? Then it’s time to think outside the box and start commenting on blogs of other people and brands. To grow your brand you need to create interaction and engagement with other businesses, people and markets. If you found someone’s blog post or video helpful–comment on their posts and let them know! It’s great way to jump start an online relationship.

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15Sep

5 Reasons Entrepreneurs Need to Use Social Media

Posted by: Katie Leimkuehler Categories: Social Media
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social media entrepreneur

Are you taking full advantage of the benefits social media has to offer?  Whether you are in the startup stage or ten years into your entrepreneurial journey, it’s critical that your business is active on social media. It’s not about throwing up a Facebook page and calling it a day.  The strategy and value of social media can change the very landscape of your business. So, why exactly do you need to be on social media and how can you take advantage of it? Here are five ways to take advantage of social media for your business.

1. Get the World Needs to Know You Exist

It’s fantastic that you’ve created an amazing product, service, or business, but if you want to keep that momentum going, you’ll need to go where your customers are: on social media. Don’t make the mistake of putting social media on the back burner and getting left behind. Social media helps you increase your brand awareness and your messaging. It’s the chance for you to showcase what you stand for in the public eye so people understand not only what your company does but also what it stands for.

Action Step: Research the top social channels your audience is on (find out what channels you should be on) and create social media accounts on those networks.

2. Get Quick Feedback on Your Products & Services

If you really want to move fast with your company, what better way than to ask the customers trying it? Do you need to test a new product? Find your beta testers on social media and get feedback at rapid pace. Not only will they give you feedback, but you’ll also cultivate a loyal following from the beginning by involving them and providing great customer service along the way.

Action Step: Post a comment on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram asking your online community for feedback on something you’re working on.

3. Monitor Leads & Potential Prospects

Wouldn’t it be great if you could find key influencers in your industry and create relationships with them? Well, you can through social media. You can findinfluencers and monitor tons of online conversations by searching for keywords and by observing negative or positive sentiments. For example, if someone is having bad experience with a competitor’s product, you can swoop in and offer a solution. Check out these social media tools that can help you monitor and manage your social media.

Action Step: Login to Twitter and type in a competitor’s name with the keyword complaints and see what people are saying.  Then see if you can join the conversation. Do the same for your company and see how you can help your customers.

4. Create Connections to Make a Huge Business Impact

Need referrals or business partners? Well, by building your social media network, you’ll have more access to these potential collaborators. Social media gives you the opportunity to expand your influence and to reach even just one potential investor, brand advocate, or future employee that could completely change the game for your business.

Action Step: Find and follow the top potential business partners, investors, and customers in your industry and start conversations with them on social media.

5. Find a Supportive Entrepreneurial Community

Let’s face it: Being an entrepreneur is no cakewalk. At some point, you’ll want to get advice and support from other entrepreneurs going down the same path.  Social media is the perfect place to create these connections. What’s better than finding mentors or startup support groups online and turning these into real life relationships? You can join Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups and even join Meetups. It’s easy to use social media to search for other entrepreneurs by city location, especially on Twitter.

Action Step: Login to Twitter, go to the search bar, click “Advance Search,” and type in your location and keywords to find startups in your area.

No matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, having a presence on social media is crucial. Social media holds a vast treasure chest of benefits for entrepreneurs, and taking advantage of these benefits can completely revitalize your business.

Want more social media tips? Check out The 10 Ultimate Productivity Hacks for Social Media Management.

This post originally appeared on Startup Grind.

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